“... to death in mines and quarries, but slavery wasn’t racialised and inescapable as it is in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Husbands commemorated slave-wives, and freed slaves did the same for their former masters. Everyone I’ve mentioned so far was a member of the upper class, or at least was related to or owned by someone who had special status. Is there any sign of ...”

“... for Sexton Blake, which is rhyming slang for ‘fake’, and was the monogram used by the forger Tom Keating, after he got caught, to indicate his own work. I think the framer was expecting me to be disappointed, but I was thrilled. The picture is not as old as I imagined. I thought it was early 20th-century whereas Keating only started signing his work ...”

“... By the closing pages, Alice – denuded of most of her mystery – has more than a whiff of Holland Barrett about her. There is even a touching if Bettelheimish childhood trauma to illuminate her nature. Yet some of the best moments in the book are the nightmarish visions of Satan, of bloodthirsty weasels, of Alice standing on her path in the sun ...”

“... is pure ‘Carry on up the Corner Flag’. Later, Kuper interviews the Preston North End winger Tom Finney about the Cup Final of 1941, when Preston beat Arsenal. Wasn’t it odd, he asks, to play the final in bombed-out London? ‘I wasn’t all that interested in the war when I was playing,’ Finney answers. ‘I was only 18. And the main concern was to ...”

“... by his treasonable démarches in England and America before the war, and in Sweden, Switzerland, Holland and Turkey during it. He knew the death he faced would be peculiarly horrible. What he did he did for his country. He was a patriot. But was he also a nationalist? Grant Duff thought so, and their friendship came to grief over their differences. But the ...”

“... were peripatetic. In 1924, after a second working voyage across the Atlantic, he jumped ship in Holland and made his way to Paris, where he eked out a living as a sous-chef cum plongeur. Stays in Cuba, in Haiti, in the Soviet Union (where he spent ten months in 1932-33) and in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War allowed him to connect his own experiences of ...”

“... of a hyperactive highlighter pen. When he asks, rhetorically, ‘Did Marvell, in [describing] Holland “As but th’off-scouring of the British sand”, recall Nedham’s description in 1650 of Scotland, a “country which sticks like a scab upon the fair body of this unfortunate island?”’, the only possible answer is ‘no’. But although one can ...”

“... In 1834, T.B. Macaulay left Holland House to unaccustomed silences, and set sail for Madras, where he was to save £30,000 and draft the penal code. Indian leisure inspired him to reread Greek. Thucydides, Euripides, Demosthenes, all got good marks. Fiction came off less well. Macaulay was a great reader of novels (to his father’s and Clapham’s distress); the Governor-General’s court wept over his copy of Clarissa ...”

“... that Mr Berkshire had been fined for dangerous driving, after knocking down a Quaker woman on Holland Street; that they were robbed in 1838 by 16-year-old Jane Smith, the daughter of their maid, whom they prosecuted for taking, along with a lot of silver cutlery, three watches and fourteen gold rings. I picture the ...”

“... to or from Hornung in the equally massive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Rowland has a whole chapter on the relations between Willie and Oscar, ‘Wilde about the boy’, which he begins with a warning: ‘It must be emphasised from the outset that, in the absence of information of a more tangible ...”

“... of 1941; expulsion from Glasgow School of Art for organising a student strike; travels through Holland with the Non-Combatant Corps; working as a shepherd with a dog called Finn MacCool; and the destruction of all his paintings at the end of the 1950s. This was followed by a stay on Rousay in Orkney, an island promoted to Finlay’s paradise lost when he ...”

“... wars showed how to ‘brew up’ a tank with the aid of Molotov cocktails. Also at Osterley, Tom Wintringham, who had commanded a battalion of the International Brigade in Spain, taught that ‘two or three determined men with a length of tram line or stout iron bar can often [sic] put a tank out of action’ (by thrusting it between track and ...”

“... say, been carrying Buckhurst’s letters we should understand how, later on, he knew his way about Holland and Zeeland; and we might get a jolt when we remembered that Buckhurst in his younger days had been Thomas Sackville, joint author of the original English blank-verse tragedy, Gorboduc. He had also been recommended for a translation of Lucan’s epic ...”

“... Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom Lehrer or Jools Holland, McGann’s style at the lectern as on the page gets nearer to George Eliot reading her works. Yet the Foucauldian Californians are programmed pessimists, who find the individualism, colour and ...”

“... of Theophrastus’ Rumour Monger (whom he calls the Busy Body), who claims to know ‘whether Holland will have peace’, rather than what Polyperchon had got up to. That combination of attitudes towards antiquity is evidently inconsistent, or at least characterised by a desire to have one’s cake and eat it; yet this inconsistency underpins most forms ...”